FARMINGTON - The local Rotary Club had an unlikely speaker at their meeting Thursday morning; nationally famed criminal defense attorney F. Lee Bailey.

Bailey, best known for his role in a string of high-profile defense cases including the Sam Sheppard appeal and re-trial in 1966, the court-martial of Capt. Ernest Medina in 1971 and the Patty Hearst trial of 1976, among others. More recently, during the 1994 O.J. Simpson trial, Bailey was part of Simpson’s defense team.

Bailey said he had ties with Maine since vacationing in Greene at a young age. A former pilot in the US Marine Corps, he now owns Oxford Aviation Inc., in Oxford, Maine.

The Farmington Rotary Club heard a presentation by Bailey on a program designed to reintegrate ex-felons into society through offering employment opportunities at Maine businesses. The concept is based off of Amicus, a 30-year-old program in Minnesota which utilizes a partnerships between businesses and the state’s corrections department to provide recently-incarcerated individuals with a job.

The average recidivism rate for felonies, the number of ex-convicts who commit new crimes once released, is roughly 75 percent, according to Bailey. That is, three out of four felons will commit new criminal conduct if released. This, Bailey said, should not be a surprise.

“We have set the system up in a way that encourages them to fail,” Bailey said. He went on to list the challenges facing felons such as having only associated with other felons while incarcerated, often being unequipped to deal with society and sometimes have limited or no skills.

“You would not tolerate a failure rate of this type anywhere else in society,” he said.

Providing felons stable jobs, Bailey believes, can greatly lower the recidivism rate. He became involved with the process after Oxford Aviation employed a felon for six months. Both the company and individual benefited from the experience, Bailey said; the felon got a job and some structure in his post-incarceration life and Oxford Aviation got a hard worker.

“They’ve got to be productive and they’ve got to settle in,” Bailey said of people who utilize the program.

While technology, such as the polygraph lie detector test, could help select the right sort of ex-felons to participate, Bailey said that the program would not work without strong support from businesses.

“We need businesses who are going to put their shoulder to the program and say - don’t let this guy fail,” Bailey said. There were benefits beyond helping the community, Bailey said, including federal tax breaks and opportunities to bond the business’ money should some of it be stolen.

The program would start with a small number of carefully-selected felons, Bailey said. He noted that these were people who had been convicted of serious crimes, and business-owners shouldn’t expect to get someone who had been wrongly accused or the like.

“You aren’t going to find many people in Warren [Maine State Prison] that stole a loaf of bread to feed their family,” he said. “You’re going to get a guy who embezzled a bunch of money from his boss, who stuck a pistol in someone’s face at a 7-11, who was on drugs.”

However, with the estimated cost of housing a felon up to $65,000 a year, Bailey believes something must be done. He noted that the Minnesota program dropped the recidivism rate from 75 percent to 25 percent in two years.

Bailey also took questions from the Rotary club. He said that the Sheppard and Medina cases had been the most challenging and satisfying to him personally. Bailey has visited other Maine towns about his program and hopes to meet with Department of Corrections officials soon.